The strong and narrow selleck diffraction peaks demonstrate good crystallinity. No appearance of other diffraction peaks indicates the high phase purity. The XRD pattern of CdS-sensitized ZnO nanosheets after 20 cycles is also shown in Figure 3 (red line). It is observed that the CdS/ZnO nanostructure exhibits weak diffraction peaks at 2θ = 26.56°, 30.74°, 44.05°, and 52.11°, corresponding to the (111), (200), (220), and (311) planes, respectively, of CdS cubic phase crystal

structure (JCPDS 80–0019). This result confirms the successful deposition of CdS nanoparticles on ZnO nanosheet arrays. Figure 3 XRD patterns of ZnO nanosheets (black line) and ZnO/CdS nanosheets on weaved titanium wires (red line). Optical property of the CdS nanoparticles The UV-visible transmission spectrum of CdS/ZnO nanostructure sample was recorded using a ZnO nanosheet array without CdS nanoparticles as the reference. Wortmannin As shown in Figure 4, an optical bandgap of 2.4 eV is estimated for the as-synthesized CdS nanoparticles from the transmission spectrum, which is close to the bandgap of bulk CdS. No obvious blueshift caused by quantum confinement is observed, indicating that the size of the CdS grains is well above the CdS Bohr exciton diameter (approximately 2.9 nm). A strong absorption was observed for light with a wavelength shorter than 540 nm, corresponding to the most intensive part of the solar spectrum. Figure 4 Typical optical

transmission spectrum eFT-508 in vivo of CdS/ZnO nanostructures. Photovoltaic performance of the solar cell based on CdS/ZnO/Ti nanostructures Figure 5 shows the photocurrent-voltage (I-V) performance of the sensitized solar cells assembled using CdS/ZnO/Ti nanostructured photoanodes. BCKDHB The I-V curves

of the samples were measured under 1 sun illumination (AM1.5, 100 mW/cm2). All the photocurrent-voltage performance parameters are summarized in Table 1. Figure 5 depicts the correlation between SILAR cycles and performance parameters obtained from CdS/ZnO/Ti nanostructured solar cells. As the SILAR cycles increase from 10 to 20, more CdS nanoparticles are deposited onto the ZnO nanosheets, the J sc and the V oc of the solar device increase correspondingly. The best J sc of 20.1 mA/cm2 is obtained for the sample with 20 SILAR cycles, indicating a light-to-electricity conversion efficiency of 2.17%. This remarkable short current density could be ascribed to the direct contact between ZnO and weaved titanium wires with low internal resistance, which provided a more desirable pathway for electron transport. When the SILAR cycles further increased, the conversion efficiency of the solar cell decreased. This decrease could be attributed to the increasing thickness of the CdS layer, which largely increases the resistance in solar cells and blocks the pathway for electrons from the photoanode to the weaved titanium wire. Figure 5 I – V curves for CdS/ZnO/Ti nanoparticle-sensitized solar cell with different CdS SILAR cycles.